Construction workers in North Korea are being given crystal meth to increase productivity

In this age of internet and smartphones, North Korea remains one of the few countries we know very little about. News about the daily happenings in the country do not always reach the rest of the world. But when they do, they tend to be shocking and alarming to say the least.

Like the recent report that construction workers in North Korea are being given crystal meth (methamphetamine), as a way of hastening progress on a skyscraper currently under development in the nation’s capital Pyongyang. According to the rumors, project managers are providing builders with sizable doses of the dangerous stimulant, in a bid to complete the construction of a 70-story residential tower on Ryomyung Street. Radio Free Asia revealed:

Project managers are now openly providing drugs to construction workers so that they will work faster. Project managers at a building site in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang are openly supplying their exhausted work force with powerful methamphetamines called ‘ice’. [They] are undergoing terrible sufferings in their work.

As part of the massive 60-building development project, several hundred thousand workers have been hired to work on the skyscraper. News that officials are doling out “ice” or crystal meth to builders surfaced when graffiti reading “Pyongyang speed is drug speed” was found discovered along one of the building’s walls. As sources have pointed out, the project is one of the many initiatives taken by Kim Jong-un’s government for what they are calling “a great golden age of construction”.

Methamphetamine is potent neurological stimulant, which when inhaled enhances alertness and productivity, while also lowering inhibitions. It is also known to give rise to aggression and confusion in users. Effects of a single dose of crystal meth are believed to last for a total of 12 hours. Continued consumption of the drug can cause an array of serious health problems, including heart attacks, psychoses and brain damage.